Public opinion seems to be that Congress, or more collectively Washington, is full of a bunch of lying, two faced, whiny toddlers who happen to be sophisticated enough to trade on inside information and get away with it, but can’t agree on how to decrease unemployment and put America “back on track”. Politicians spend more time pointing fingers at other people for past problems than they do trying to come up with solutions to fix current ones. Most are embarrassingly uneducated on subjects such as finance and economics that have enormous implications for citizens well being and future. This is easily evidenced by people like Michelle Bachmann and her $2 a gallon gas promise as well as Rick Perry and his inability to name even 3 programs he would cut to curb spending as witnessed during his now infamous “Oops” debate (never mind his inability to even understand the positives and negatives associated with those cuts). We had to waste time listening to a 9-9-9 pizza tax plan that clearly would increase taxes on the lower and middle class (although it can be argued validly that this would be more than fair, but that’s another discussion for another time).
The media continues to cherry pick its favorites by ignoring legitimate candidates like Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul and focusing on flavor of the week losers who are a disgrace to the republican party (it’s shocking that the liberal media would do such a thing, apparently being liberal doesn’t involve unbiased, free, and fairly reported news and no I am not a republican). Our newest flavor is Newt who has had 3 wives I believe, cheated on at least one of them, and took money from Fannie and Freddie for “consulting” services while supporting their growth in size. I am not here to make an argument for or against these programs, but rather to point out his hypocrisy in calling himself a republican as well as the fact that he is a sell-out (sadly, that argument could be made for almost everyone in office). I don’t really care how many women he cheated on as frankly it is not my business, but if an affair involving Herman Cain upsets the public so much that he has to pull out (pun intended) of the race over it, why does Newt get a free pass? We really aren’t that naïve to think he’s a changed man are we? I could go on and on regarding how inexplicably nauseating our politicians and political system is. Ironically, the bone chilling reality is that the politicians are not the root of the problem; the uneducated, indecisive, short-sighted voters are. We, my beloved readers, are the problem and our disagreements and hypocrisy is reflected on a larger scale by Washington.
We have a party (the Tea Party) that has formed demanding extreme cuts in spending that would send the U.S. spiraling into a depression giving rise to guys like Eric Cantor who play scenes from Hollywood movies (The Town) in meetings to rally Republicans on basically saying no to anything Democrats propose even if it based in conservative ideals. After all, we don’t want Obama getting credit for anything before the 2012 election now do we? This party was and is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers and the Murdock family (not a conspiracy theorist, but quite the coincidence that the Murdoch scandal came out right around the time the Tea Party was gaining power and pissing people off in Congress). I’m torn between laughing and crying when I see all the poor uneducated people supporting the cuts to the welfare and government spending that keeps them going as most don’t understand what they are supporting in being a part of the Tea Party (neither do the OWS people who want socialism, more on that later).
We have a President that back tracked on what he considered to be his biggest achievement that he fought tooth and nail for, healthcare reform. We have democrats trying to play off of the socialist Occupy Wall Street movement by promoting class warfare and talking as if those in the 1% are evil and should be heavily taxed. Apparently, everyone who is rich didn’t earn it, they all cheated for their money and we should redistribute it to the poor. The disappointedly sobering fact of the matter is that most senators and members of the house are in the 1% and a lot of them did cheat to get there or improve upon their financial standing whereas the majority of the American people outside politics did not. All of these aforementioned extremes that are represented in our political system exist because significant slices of the American population have bunched themselves into these extreme categories. Instead of coming together united to solve this problem, the majority of us have all decided to join differing extremist groups that coincide with what hurts us and helps us on an individual basis. Let me explain what I mean.
We should all recognize that as individuals, states, and as a country we have spent more money than we could afford and did so on credit. We all screwed up. We all acted like pigs demanding tax cuts from our politicians combined with more entitlements (government spending). This led to an enormous deficit that was not helped by stupid irresponsible crusades in the Middle East based on false intelligence, to put it nicely, or bullshit and lies, to be blunt. Now the reality of our overspending is beginning to set in and people are pissed off. We have spent the last decade living lifestyles beyond our pay grade and now that we have tasted excess, we don’t want to let it go. I would bet that many of you reading this know someone who is or was unemployed and could have worked but refused to accept a job because it didn’t pay as much as they were making before; I know I do. The point is that no one wants to move backwards and will act illogically (having no income is not better than having some), living in denial about the reality of their situation (which is they were overpaid before and their skills are not longer worth as much or in demand), in a desperate attempt to cling to the “when everything was rosy” past. This desire to avoid the responsibility of dealing with the consequences that come from irresponsible and wreck less financial choices is what is splitting our nation apart.
Most people are smart enough to realize that the nation as a whole lived beyond its means for too long and needs to cut back ASAP. The problem is that the majority of Americans now depend on entitlement programs and government spending that helped bring us to where we are today. If you are poor you argue that it’s unfair if your food stamps, heat subsidies, welfare, unemployment, etc are cut and feel that the rich should be taxed more. If you are rich you are annoyed that you have to pay for everyone else when you worked hard to get where you are. The top 1% pay about 40% of all federal income taxes while about 47% of people in this country give nothing back to society paying nothing in federal tax. If you are a doctor you want spending cut but not the government spending that comes from Medicare and Medicaid that pays your salary. If you are old you want your social security not to mention that it better not get reformed. If you work for Lockheed Martin you don’t want defense spending cut and of course you believe that your program and job is crucial to America’s safety. If you are a teacher you don’t want education spending cut or your beloved unions broken up. God forbid you actually have to work 8 or more hours a day and more than 180 days a year and are held responsible for your performance (or lack thereof) with the possibility of losing your job (tenure’s negatives are far greater than its positives and its existence makes me sick) like everyone else in this country. Government workers don’t want their pensions reformed or retirement age pushed back, farmers want their subsidies, oil companies want to keep their tax breaks, and you get the idea.
Ahhhhh, now it’s becoming more clear as to why the politicians can’t agree on anything, can’t agree on what to cut, and don’t get anything done. Everything is everyone else’s fault, not our own; cut spending just not spending that I depend on. For those of you passionate about economics, this is exactly why governments inevitably tax people via inflation and print money instead of engaging in meaningful spending cuts. On the aggregate, people are too uneducated to understand what is going on and it causes less alarm and raucous than outright cuts. The old and poor get hit the hardest in an inflationary environment.
Take a good look at Greece and Italy. Look at their unemployment and the enormous cuts and pain they are taking because of how they chose to live outside their means for so long. Look at the riots and the poverty. This is the path we are heading down with our growing belief that we are entitled to a house, food, a job, etc. Hell I even saw a YouTube video with an OWS protestors that wants all student loan debt forgiven because, “that’s what he wants”. Did you know that more Porsche Cayenne were registered in Greece than people who declared making more than €50,000 a year in 2010? That is just one make from one car company. What a joke of a country. Let’s make sure that we don’t become Greece.
Now I have to propose some solutions or I too am just pointing fingers, right? Well the purpose of this article was to first recognize the source of the problem and to try and make it apparent to us all. We are the problem. We need to change our attitudes and our mentality. Life is not all about the good of the individual and instant gratification. We need to practice fiscal self control and cut back and take some pain for the mistakes made in the past. Whether it’s fair or not, the rich should pay a little more, the poor should have some programs cut back. Get out of the Middle East and stop spending money on pointless wars to control oil. If we had taken that money and put it into alternative technologies we would have cheap and efficient electric cars, solar, and wind power by now. Amazing how GM can’t even launch a $50k car that travels 40 miles on a charge (the Volt), but a start up relatively poor company (relative to GM) like Tesla can make a luxury one for about the same price that goes 300 without “fire safety issues”.
Bring us back to capitalism, bring back Glass Steagall, and break up the banks. Make them too small to bail out. Stop giving oil companies tax breaks and subsidies. Raise the retirement age to 70, do it over time if you have to; we are living longer and can’t afford to pay for all the baby boomer retirees who were not responsible enough to save on their own without government help (social security). Find a way to let fiscally responsible citizens opt out of social security and instead contribute to a personal IRA. I don’t think anyone wants the government taking money weekly from them that they will never see again in the same amount. If money must be taken from my paycheck I want to see it deposited in a retirement account that I can actually see online. This country was built on hard work not retirement. If you want to retire early, go to Greece. Public workers call it quits between 50 and 55 there. Have fun. Deregulate small business and promote entrepreneurship. Get rid of teachers unions (at least eliminate their influence on politicians). If you want to increase teacher’s pay that’s fine, but make the day 8 hours long and the school year longer. We don’t need kids working on the farm during the summer anymore so we don’t need 10 weeks of a brain drain vacation. Again, our country wasn’t built on the idea that we should be lazy and have “fun” because we are young, it was built on hard work. Regardless, you can do both anyway, they are not mutually exclusive.
Pay all politicians the median income for the state in which they reside. Politicians are elected to serve the people, not profit off of them or live above them. Try politicians who have taken bribes or traded on inside information in a court of law. Regulate the amount of money companies are allowed to charge for drugs. I am all for capitalism, but not at the expense of human life (i.e. just because someone will pay $1,000 for a pill to stay alive doesn’t mean they should be charged that much if the pill was made for $10). Healthcare companies should not be publicly traded and neither should banks, but that is a whole different discussion (I wrote about this in my The Problem With Healthcare post if you are interested). Make it illegal for any corporation to contribute money to any politician. Personal contributions are okay, but should have a limit (maybe $5,000). In addition, a website should be created that has every politician’s name with every single penny that they have ever received from any person or corporation as well as the time at which they received it. We need transparency in our political system. Someone needs to police Congress because the judicial branch has failed.
There are many more ideas and ways to help get our country back on track. The most important thing to take out of this is that we are all responsible for what this country has become and we will all be responsible for its future. Edmund Burke once wrote, “when bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” The bad “men” here are in all of us in the form of instant gratification, short sightedness, unwillingness to take the time to educate ourselves on political and economic issues thereby failing to garner the ability to cast a meaningful vote, and indecisiveness. Collectively, we all must recognize the need for sacrifice by everyone on both an individual and national scale, or else fail in our own contemptible struggle fueled by selfishness and naïve arrogance. Don’t feel stupid, I had to look up contemptible too.
The media continues to cherry pick its favorites by ignoring legitimate candidates like Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul and focusing on flavor of the week losers who are a disgrace to the republican party (it’s shocking that the liberal media would do such a thing, apparently being liberal doesn’t involve unbiased, free, and fairly reported news and no I am not a republican). Our newest flavor is Newt who has had 3 wives I believe, cheated on at least one of them, and took money from Fannie and Freddie for “consulting” services while supporting their growth in size. I am not here to make an argument for or against these programs, but rather to point out his hypocrisy in calling himself a republican as well as the fact that he is a sell-out (sadly, that argument could be made for almost everyone in office). I don’t really care how many women he cheated on as frankly it is not my business, but if an affair involving Herman Cain upsets the public so much that he has to pull out (pun intended) of the race over it, why does Newt get a free pass? We really aren’t that naïve to think he’s a changed man are we? I could go on and on regarding how inexplicably nauseating our politicians and political system is. Ironically, the bone chilling reality is that the politicians are not the root of the problem; the uneducated, indecisive, short-sighted voters are. We, my beloved readers, are the problem and our disagreements and hypocrisy is reflected on a larger scale by Washington.
We have a party (the Tea Party) that has formed demanding extreme cuts in spending that would send the U.S. spiraling into a depression giving rise to guys like Eric Cantor who play scenes from Hollywood movies (The Town) in meetings to rally Republicans on basically saying no to anything Democrats propose even if it based in conservative ideals. After all, we don’t want Obama getting credit for anything before the 2012 election now do we? This party was and is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers and the Murdock family (not a conspiracy theorist, but quite the coincidence that the Murdoch scandal came out right around the time the Tea Party was gaining power and pissing people off in Congress). I’m torn between laughing and crying when I see all the poor uneducated people supporting the cuts to the welfare and government spending that keeps them going as most don’t understand what they are supporting in being a part of the Tea Party (neither do the OWS people who want socialism, more on that later).
We have a President that back tracked on what he considered to be his biggest achievement that he fought tooth and nail for, healthcare reform. We have democrats trying to play off of the socialist Occupy Wall Street movement by promoting class warfare and talking as if those in the 1% are evil and should be heavily taxed. Apparently, everyone who is rich didn’t earn it, they all cheated for their money and we should redistribute it to the poor. The disappointedly sobering fact of the matter is that most senators and members of the house are in the 1% and a lot of them did cheat to get there or improve upon their financial standing whereas the majority of the American people outside politics did not. All of these aforementioned extremes that are represented in our political system exist because significant slices of the American population have bunched themselves into these extreme categories. Instead of coming together united to solve this problem, the majority of us have all decided to join differing extremist groups that coincide with what hurts us and helps us on an individual basis. Let me explain what I mean.
We should all recognize that as individuals, states, and as a country we have spent more money than we could afford and did so on credit. We all screwed up. We all acted like pigs demanding tax cuts from our politicians combined with more entitlements (government spending). This led to an enormous deficit that was not helped by stupid irresponsible crusades in the Middle East based on false intelligence, to put it nicely, or bullshit and lies, to be blunt. Now the reality of our overspending is beginning to set in and people are pissed off. We have spent the last decade living lifestyles beyond our pay grade and now that we have tasted excess, we don’t want to let it go. I would bet that many of you reading this know someone who is or was unemployed and could have worked but refused to accept a job because it didn’t pay as much as they were making before; I know I do. The point is that no one wants to move backwards and will act illogically (having no income is not better than having some), living in denial about the reality of their situation (which is they were overpaid before and their skills are not longer worth as much or in demand), in a desperate attempt to cling to the “when everything was rosy” past. This desire to avoid the responsibility of dealing with the consequences that come from irresponsible and wreck less financial choices is what is splitting our nation apart.
Most people are smart enough to realize that the nation as a whole lived beyond its means for too long and needs to cut back ASAP. The problem is that the majority of Americans now depend on entitlement programs and government spending that helped bring us to where we are today. If you are poor you argue that it’s unfair if your food stamps, heat subsidies, welfare, unemployment, etc are cut and feel that the rich should be taxed more. If you are rich you are annoyed that you have to pay for everyone else when you worked hard to get where you are. The top 1% pay about 40% of all federal income taxes while about 47% of people in this country give nothing back to society paying nothing in federal tax. If you are a doctor you want spending cut but not the government spending that comes from Medicare and Medicaid that pays your salary. If you are old you want your social security not to mention that it better not get reformed. If you work for Lockheed Martin you don’t want defense spending cut and of course you believe that your program and job is crucial to America’s safety. If you are a teacher you don’t want education spending cut or your beloved unions broken up. God forbid you actually have to work 8 or more hours a day and more than 180 days a year and are held responsible for your performance (or lack thereof) with the possibility of losing your job (tenure’s negatives are far greater than its positives and its existence makes me sick) like everyone else in this country. Government workers don’t want their pensions reformed or retirement age pushed back, farmers want their subsidies, oil companies want to keep their tax breaks, and you get the idea.
Ahhhhh, now it’s becoming more clear as to why the politicians can’t agree on anything, can’t agree on what to cut, and don’t get anything done. Everything is everyone else’s fault, not our own; cut spending just not spending that I depend on. For those of you passionate about economics, this is exactly why governments inevitably tax people via inflation and print money instead of engaging in meaningful spending cuts. On the aggregate, people are too uneducated to understand what is going on and it causes less alarm and raucous than outright cuts. The old and poor get hit the hardest in an inflationary environment.
Take a good look at Greece and Italy. Look at their unemployment and the enormous cuts and pain they are taking because of how they chose to live outside their means for so long. Look at the riots and the poverty. This is the path we are heading down with our growing belief that we are entitled to a house, food, a job, etc. Hell I even saw a YouTube video with an OWS protestors that wants all student loan debt forgiven because, “that’s what he wants”. Did you know that more Porsche Cayenne were registered in Greece than people who declared making more than €50,000 a year in 2010? That is just one make from one car company. What a joke of a country. Let’s make sure that we don’t become Greece.
Now I have to propose some solutions or I too am just pointing fingers, right? Well the purpose of this article was to first recognize the source of the problem and to try and make it apparent to us all. We are the problem. We need to change our attitudes and our mentality. Life is not all about the good of the individual and instant gratification. We need to practice fiscal self control and cut back and take some pain for the mistakes made in the past. Whether it’s fair or not, the rich should pay a little more, the poor should have some programs cut back. Get out of the Middle East and stop spending money on pointless wars to control oil. If we had taken that money and put it into alternative technologies we would have cheap and efficient electric cars, solar, and wind power by now. Amazing how GM can’t even launch a $50k car that travels 40 miles on a charge (the Volt), but a start up relatively poor company (relative to GM) like Tesla can make a luxury one for about the same price that goes 300 without “fire safety issues”.
Bring us back to capitalism, bring back Glass Steagall, and break up the banks. Make them too small to bail out. Stop giving oil companies tax breaks and subsidies. Raise the retirement age to 70, do it over time if you have to; we are living longer and can’t afford to pay for all the baby boomer retirees who were not responsible enough to save on their own without government help (social security). Find a way to let fiscally responsible citizens opt out of social security and instead contribute to a personal IRA. I don’t think anyone wants the government taking money weekly from them that they will never see again in the same amount. If money must be taken from my paycheck I want to see it deposited in a retirement account that I can actually see online. This country was built on hard work not retirement. If you want to retire early, go to Greece. Public workers call it quits between 50 and 55 there. Have fun. Deregulate small business and promote entrepreneurship. Get rid of teachers unions (at least eliminate their influence on politicians). If you want to increase teacher’s pay that’s fine, but make the day 8 hours long and the school year longer. We don’t need kids working on the farm during the summer anymore so we don’t need 10 weeks of a brain drain vacation. Again, our country wasn’t built on the idea that we should be lazy and have “fun” because we are young, it was built on hard work. Regardless, you can do both anyway, they are not mutually exclusive.
Pay all politicians the median income for the state in which they reside. Politicians are elected to serve the people, not profit off of them or live above them. Try politicians who have taken bribes or traded on inside information in a court of law. Regulate the amount of money companies are allowed to charge for drugs. I am all for capitalism, but not at the expense of human life (i.e. just because someone will pay $1,000 for a pill to stay alive doesn’t mean they should be charged that much if the pill was made for $10). Healthcare companies should not be publicly traded and neither should banks, but that is a whole different discussion (I wrote about this in my The Problem With Healthcare post if you are interested). Make it illegal for any corporation to contribute money to any politician. Personal contributions are okay, but should have a limit (maybe $5,000). In addition, a website should be created that has every politician’s name with every single penny that they have ever received from any person or corporation as well as the time at which they received it. We need transparency in our political system. Someone needs to police Congress because the judicial branch has failed.
There are many more ideas and ways to help get our country back on track. The most important thing to take out of this is that we are all responsible for what this country has become and we will all be responsible for its future. Edmund Burke once wrote, “when bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” The bad “men” here are in all of us in the form of instant gratification, short sightedness, unwillingness to take the time to educate ourselves on political and economic issues thereby failing to garner the ability to cast a meaningful vote, and indecisiveness. Collectively, we all must recognize the need for sacrifice by everyone on both an individual and national scale, or else fail in our own contemptible struggle fueled by selfishness and naïve arrogance. Don’t feel stupid, I had to look up contemptible too.